Poetry Prompts Freeforall: Let Me Introduce You

29Aug

8:10 a.m. — Atlanta

Listening to Iz singing ‘Ama ‘ama

Surprise! Hello, everyone. I know I didn’t announce the restart of the Freeforall but, when Miz Quickly asked me to not forget her September run, I realised a short entry might be a good way to get back into this. As much as I enjoy writing the list each week, it takes the most time and effort. I was putting off starting and needed a nudge. I’m going to give you a few links, with a little more focus, as I reintroduce the sites. With each Friday, I’ll add a couple.

Sepia Saturday is a site I added fairly recently, conscious of the high degree of enjoyment you receive from image prompts. They say of themselves: Launched by Alan Burnett and Kat Mortensen in 2009, Sepia Saturday provides bloggers with an opportunity to share their history through the medium of photographs. Historical photographs of any age or kind (they don’t have to be sepia) become the launchpad for explorations of family history, local history and social history in fact or fiction, poetry or prose, words or further images. If you want to play along, all we ask is that your sign up to the weekly Linky List, that you try to visit as many of the other participants as possible, and that you have fun.

Miz Quickly is a periodic prompt site, but when we have her, we have her for an entire month, so get those pens ready for September, when she will be back in action. Here’s what she says:

I don’t believe in writer’s block. Or muses. I do believe in depression, habit, boredom, self-fulfilling prophesy. And Chaos. I believe a poem is a well-constructed box with drawers. Anything can go into it, but if you put all your energy into making the box perfect, the contents will suffer. And if you build a slipshod box…well.

We’re not going to concentrate on building Fabergé eggs. Just some drafts that you can gild and polish later. Now and then, we’ll consider form and function, but most days we’ll be working on the marbles and screws and old silver dimes to stash. Quantities. We want to get you loose-jointed and a little bit crazy. Later, you can work on polish.

I added the Found Poetry Review when I realised there are a lot of editors who haven’t caught onto the fact that found poetry is not a fad, or who do not understand found poetry and how it works. That’s how the Review started: Jenni founded the Found Poetry Review in 2011 after receiving a rejection letter in response to her own found poetry submissions, reading “How about next time you try to write something original and not plagiarize someone else’s work for a change!” And when we say “founded,” we mean bought the website domain in the wee hours of the night and felt like it was still a good idea the next morning.

This week’s prompt asks us to play with regional dialects.

Alright, I’m exhausted. I need breakfast. Investigate these three sites. Wander through them. Read what they say. Try one of their prompts. I shall see you Tuesday for a prompt; Thursday for links; and next Friday for more prompt sites.

If people have a prompt site they like, especially a new one, let me know. I won’t promise they’ll make the list but I would love to check them out.